chris otter

Ohio State University, History, Faculty Member

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I am a historian of the material world, with a particular focus on infrastructures, systems, devices and contraptions and, cumulatively, the entire human niche, or technosphere, within which human and nonhuman life unfolds and is shaped.

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Papers by chris otter

Container Ontologies

Containment: Technologies of Holding, Filtering, Leaking, 2024

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Planetary Agglomeration

Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750, , 2024

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Socializing the Technosphere

Technology and Culture, 2022

Scholarly interest in the technosphere is exploding. Most analyses define the technosphere as mas... more Scholarly interest in the technosphere is exploding. Most analyses define the technosphere as massive, modern, and autonomous. This article constructively critiques these claims, focusing on scale, time, and power. First, it suggests that the technosphere exists at multiple scales that intersect in myriad ways. Second, it shows that the technosphere has a three-million-year history, meaning that Homo sapiens and the technosphere coevolved. This coevolution implies that the technosphere is a profoundly social entity. Third, its history is about how human groups (usually white, male ones) have used technology to build a physical world that works to their advantage and is thus also an issue of power. As histories of pollution, climate change, and many other things show, the technosphere does not exist outside a powerless, undifferentiated humanity. Social and technological formations are thoroughly interwoven. Clark and Szerszynski have urged scholars to "socialize the Anthropocene. " This article urges scholars to "socialize" the technosphere, to interrogate and explore its social dimensions.

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Milk in Motion: Logistical Geographies in Twentieth-Century Britain

Global Food History, 2022

This article analyses the formation of the logistical system designed to supply and deliver milk ... more This article analyses the formation of the logistical system designed to supply and deliver milk in twentieth-century Britain. The article explores several themes: the painful, monotonous lives of cattle; the affective relations forged by milkmen; the acceleration of milk distribution; the rise of multiple chokepoints; and the increasingly encapsulated nature of modern milk. The system was a vast technology of niche construction, producing new milieux for cattle while increasing human milk consumption and providing novel environments for animal behavior, notably the emergent capacity of some birds to open milk bottles. The article, finally, draws attention to two major tensions within the system: that between the treatment of cows and the affection with which milkmen and bottled milk were frequently held; and that between the genuine advances toward seamless milk distribution and the endless irruption of chokepoints. These tensions suggest that logistics is a more contradictory process than is sometimes assumed.

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Locating Matter: The Place of Materiality in Urban History

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Encapsulation: Inner Worlds and Their Discontents

Journal of Literature and Science, 2018

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Technosphere

Concepts of Urban-Environmental History

Planet of Meat: A Biological History

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The technosphere: a new concept for urban studies

Urban History, 2016

According to the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, ‘c... more According to the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, ‘cities are responsible for 67% of the total global energy consumption and more than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and these trends significantly intensify the severity of some of the two great challenges of our time; climate change and energy security’. Moreover, if cities are driving anthropogenic climate change, the effects are felt everywhere on earth, from glaciers to atolls, from oceans to the troposphere. It is no longer simply society that has been, to cite Henri Lefebvre, ‘completely urbanized’. The entire planet and its atmosphere have been subordinated to the metabolic demands of extremely large human settlements.